Perspectives

(092112)

Neo-Darwinism
and the Age of Genetics

Questions:

Is evolution theory
the same today as compared to Darwin's original thinking?

What
has science learned since Darwin to change the view on evolution?

Is there a totally
new view on evolution or is the theory much like Darwin's but reformed by
new evidence?

Short
Answer:

Darwin, Wallace, Buffon
and others, in the 1800s and before, first gathered and refined many concepts
on biological evolution. But these thinkers were unable to know how traits
(e.g., specific features exhibited by plants and animals) are inherited (i.e.,
passed along) from one generation to the next. The age of genetics came later.
But when it did arrive, the new discoveries were ideologically kept in line
with expectations for how evolution works.

Darwinism was updated
with new information—to keep much of the standard
story intact—yielding what is today called neo-Darwinism.
Yet the age of genetics has progressed to an era of molecular research that
integrates what science knows of genetics, cellular biochemistry, cell structure,
and the immense information requirements for life's function. Neo-Darwinism
in the early 20th century was essentially passing the baton in a race where
evolution theory was making a good run.

Yet, the molecular
research brings still another new era, new evidence, and to a certain extent
a silence on how the data work with or against evolution. The molecular data is not clearly nor fully further evidence in favor of evolution—that
is neo-Darwinism in the race of new evidence is losing its grip on the baton.
As described elsewhere, evidence for design, the intriguing puzzle yielding
life's irreducible complexity at the molecular level of life, the loss of
specificity (e.g., of enzyme function) through seemingly advantageous mutations,
and the role the environment plays in directing change in species are some
of the examples that go beyond the assumptions housed by neo-Darwinism.

In brief, we'll make
note here of what the transition point is between Darwin's original thinking
and the neo-Darwinian synthesis by scientists in the early 20th century. Science
huddled up to make a new game plan and carried Darwinism further into the
latter 20th century with some reforms to the original theory. Genetics in
its infancy provided one of the stepping stones leading to the neo-Darwinian
movement.

Consider
This:

Interestingly enough, there was an overlap
between Darwin an Austrian monk who could have delivered powerful insight
to where the evolution theory was headed. Had Darwin heard of or met Gregor
Mendel (1822-1884) we might see a different story today.

While
he was teaching he began, in 1856, to experiment with plants in the
small monastery garden. He spent his time in the garden studying what
happened when he crossbred peas. After he became abbot, he no longer
had the time to pursue his science, but he retained a strong interest
in it for the rest of his life. In 1865 he published his important
discovery that would in time give the support that Darwin's theory
so badly needed.

Mendel found that inherited
traits do not get mixed and diluted.

Darwin
never knew of Mendel or his work; Mendel published his work in an
obscure journal. The scientific community discovered his work only
in 1900, eighteen years after Darwin died, when a Dutch botanist,
Hugo de Vries (1848-1935), brought it to their attention. De Vries
took an interest in Mendel's results, and he checked them by doing
his own experiments. He also found that new, heritable variations
can appear suddenly, and he called a these variations mutations. Spetner (NBC) Page
19

Mendel's results surfaced,
were considered significant, and were brought into the sphere of science's
endeavors to build the paradigm that details how life works. Science kept
accumulating new evidence and that evidence then, like today, was measured
against current knowledge. Did adding the new evidence to the current base
of understanding change the former thinking? Was Darwin's view fading? Let's
consider how the scientific community would respond.

During the initial
decades of the 20th century, Darwinism was overcome by the new biological
evidence. Much of this comes from the development of genetics in the areas
of transmission genetics and population
genetics. If there was any hope that Darwinism would continue into the
1940's, the theory desperately needed a fix.

The
subject was raised at a meeting of the Geological Society of America
in 1941. A suggestion was made there that geneticists join hands with
morphologists, taxonomists, and paleontologists to try and come up
with a modernized version of Darwin's theory. They were asked to try
to rebuild the theory using the latest findings in all these fields.
Specialists responded to the call, and over the next few years produced
a synthesis of their fields into a revised theory of evolution.

The scientists
who participated in establishing the new theory included the geneticists,
G. Ledyard Stebbins and Theodosius Dobzhansky, the zoologists Ernst
Meyer and Julian Huxley, the paleontologists George Gaylord Simpson
and Glen L. Jepsen, and the mathematical geneticists Sir Ronald A.
Fisher and Sewall Wright. They called this theory the Modern Synthetic
Theory Of Evolution. The theory gradually became known as the Neo-Darwinian Theory Of Evolution, and its framers and adherents
became known as neo-Darwinians. Their agenda called for a theory
that could explain the development of life in a natural way. If they
could account for the development of all the present complexity of
life from some sufficiently simple first organism, it would help pave
the way for a theory of a fully natural account of the actual origin
of life. Spetner (NBC) Page 20

So, the result of the
transition was a measure of maintenance—the core ideas in Darwin's concept
of evolution were carried forward. Yet not everything was static, there was
some change to the view.

Spetner reflects
on how neo-Darwinism rejected Darwin's a suggestion
of environmental induction of heritable variations as well as inheritance
of acquired characteristics. With the concept of genes in place, but not the
structural evidence to come later, neo-Darwinians accepted a separation of
somatic (i.e., body) and germ (i.e., gamete) cells. That is to say reproduction
is carried on by a separate subset of cells. In this separation the neo-Darwinians
did not link environmental influences nor acquired characteristics with affects
on germ cells. To their thinking, heritable variation could only come from
changes in the germ cells. As noted below and later in the WindowView, the
environment may well play an incredibly important role. So, from the start,
in this respect and perhaps elsewhere, the neo-Darwinians constrained the
operation of evolution.

... they were unable to find a mechanism that could directly produce
the genetic changes needed for descent. They therefore chose randomness as the source of the variations they needed—the very randomness
that Darwin had rejected. Some of the variations are detrimental to
the organism, but there may be some that are beneficial. A heritable
variation of the latter kind, even if rare, will increase its number
in the population by natural selection. Eventually, the change, if
it enhances the organism's ability to survive and reproduce, will
spread throughout the population.

The Neo-Darwinians
then built their theory on random variation culled and directed by natural selection. They identified the heritable variations needed by the theory with the mutations discovered and named by De Vries some forty years earlier. A decade later, Watson and Crick identified the heritable variation with the random errors in DNA replication . Spetner (NBC) Page 21

WindowView also considers
examples where the environment appears to play a role in expressing traits that are not made anew but are
contained within the genetic information already stored within an organism.
One implication here is that much more information is already stored within
an organism (i.e., a species as a whole) than can be presently revealed by
current evidence. We are led to assume new information results from new mutation
events. The idea of randomness leans toward new mutations that surface coincidental
to a 'need for an organism to adapt to change.' The idea that chance in some
way operates as part of the neo-Darwinian view is certainly part of what is
carried over from Darwin's thinking. Chance served an intended purpose to
the exclusion of other possibilities.

If
the Neo-Darwinian agenda had worked out, there would be no place for
a Creator in and the origin of life except to establish the laws by
which the evolution had taken place. Even that position would not
be an honorable one if the appearance of man were not inevitable,
as Steven J. Gould of Harvard University believes it is not [Gould
1989, pp. 292 ff]. Spetner
(NBC) Page 22

Spetner repeatedly
reminds us that the neo-Darwinians are unable to account for how new information
builds over time such that evolution works as they say (see Spetner
(NBC) Page 23). If life came
from some simple ancestral form, then new information must be added over time.
Without this there is no reasonable understanding of evolution; no means for
life to evolve.

Mendel's observations
helped to track how information was passed from generation to generation.
He did not show how the information originated nor did he demonstrate change
in that information—but more so how the information was expressed from
generation to generation and how in some cases it might drop out of sight
(i.e., for some offspring). The neo-Darwinian thinking still could do no better
and could not account for the origin of the information within organisms.

A trend appears over
time. The scientific community at large has attempted to continually carry
the evolution theory forward and to adopt as much of the new evidence within
this effort. Critical thinkers need to ask if every step in this effort is
objective, subjective, or a bit of both.

A makeover came to
Darwin's original theory in the 1940's. Today this is called the neo-Darwinian
theory (Spetner abbreviates this as: NDT). The NDT was intended to answer
difficulties that arose with new discoveries in biology. The public perception
is that the NDT answers the problems with evolutionary theory. Now, half a
century later, problems remain.

But
science does not stand still. Discoveries in the last fifty years,
and particularly in the last twenty, have been forcing evolutionists
to patch in changes to the NDT. With the natural conservation of good
science, they have been trying to keep those changes minor. The changes
nevertheless are stretching the bond the holds the theory to the facts.
That bond has been stretched to the breaking point, and evolutionists
will soon have to it knowledge that the bond has already snapped They
shall soon have to make a major innovation that will change the theory
fundamentally, and force a basic change in the philosophy of evolution.
A new theory of evolution is desperately needed.

In the NDT they
have retained the two basic Darwinian novella of variation and natural selection. They have, however, sharpened Darwin's
sometimes confused notion of variation, and insisted that it is spontaneous and random. Spetner
(NBC) Page 50

What we see here is
a perpetuation of ideas, yet as Spetner indicates the effort is wearing thin.
If the old line does not hold, then where does science go next?

A
basic dogma of the NDT is that mutations are not at all related to
the needs of the organism. The theory is based on random genetic
changes. If evolution were found to be driven by genetic changes that
were not random, that were in any way a response to the environment
or to the needs of the organism, it would contradict the theory. Evolutionists
have a stressed time and again that the variations from which evolution
stems are random in this sense. Spetner
(NBC) Page 51

Neo-Darwinism arose
to rethink Darwin's theory based on the new evidence, some of which comes
from Mendel's work that ironically coincides with the timeframe of Darwin's
own work.

As discussed later,
Spetner goes further to develop an approach that focuses on existing information
within organisms. While molecular genetics still works to sequence information
in the genetic codes of many organisms, there are other genetic mechanisms
that are already known but perhaps not well understood. These known mechanisms
are part of what Spetner considers. Further, the role of the environment becomes
much more important than previously thought. So, while neo-Darwinism may be
failing, there are possible working alternatives. WindowView here is not the
last word, but perhaps an initial look at something that will be a growing
and significant story to science in the not so distant future!

Added
Perspective:

There is much more
to the story than what we've looked at here. The key concept is that genetics
tells us something about information transfer. As evolution theory moved from
the 19th to the 20th centuries, new evidence from all areas of science kept
streaming in. Plant and animal classification, fossil evidence, understanding
genetics,biochemical and molecular studies and more all added to a complex
picture. The concepts of Darwin's day were kept alive within the neo-Darwinian
framework. The fact that scientists held fast to some lines of Darwinian thinking
may not be a surprise, for this reflects behaviors and beliefs that inter-mesh
with and go beyond science alone. Keep this in perspective as you look at
other facets of the view through this window.

Quotations from "Not By Chance"
(NBC) written by L. Spetner, are used by permission granted by Dr. Lee Spetner.

Writer / Editor: Dr. T. Peterson, Director,
WindowView.org

(090204)

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References of Interest

Step Up To Life

Time spent looking ... through a window on life and choice ... brings the opportunity to see in a new light. The offer for you to Step Up To Life is presented on many of the web pages at WindowView. Without further explanation we offer you the steps here ... knowing that depending on what you have seen or may yet explore in the window ... these steps will be the most important of your life ...